


Listen to Your Gut

by theholychesse



Series: with your hollow skull all white, i kiss your ribs goodnight [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Help Narcissa Malfoy, Narcissa POV, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2015-08-18
Packaged: 2018-04-15 11:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4604991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theholychesse/pseuds/theholychesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's the third daughter of a Black offshoot, and, in the long term, she knows she's nothing. She doesn't even bother to try. </p><p>
  <em>(Where Narcissa wants happiness, but in her gut, she knows she won't ever reach it.)<em></em></em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Listen to Your Gut

You love Hogwarts. You really do.

 

It is a building of magic, like Gringotts, like your friends’ manors, like your own home, dark and tainted as it is. But not quite like your home, not quite like it. When you walk in Hogwart’s halls, your insides don’t feel like there’s a flame gnawing their succulent meat and lapping up your sweetened blood, when you breathe in, it doesn’t feel like spice is filling up your lungs, hot and scathing and threatening to cake your lung walls to the point where they won’t be capable of sending air to your blood, when you wander and read in the library, it doesn’t feel like a million voices are pushing into y( ** _our_** ) head, harsh and judging and pleading and humming, and when you look at the adults, you don’t feel the urge to bend your neck and droop your shoulders in complete submission to soothe the beasts curling around prime offal.

 

You know why that’s the case.

 

You’re not a fool like your eldest sister, who’s as enamored with the dark as Andromeda was with the light. Dear Bellatrix, who sang and pranced in their home, and she, as the eldest, had felt the spurring hate and dark of your home to the point where she’s become numb to it all. In fact, she might relish in it, as you remember her parading her rancid, inflamed Mark,  and gushing about Him, like a teenager she never got the chance to truly be, and will forever be because of the mistakes of your parents.

 

Andromeda. She’s also a fool, that woman, for even if you loved your other sister more than the eldest, with her easier air, with her happier magic, with her snappy wit and wisdom, with her soothing hugs and gentle kisses,  you can’t deny she did something that’s inexcusable, and that’s running away with a muggle, a creature no better than an animal, than a house elf, _that_ muggle you can’t even dare to name, for your tongue burns when _his_ name sticks to your teeth, and slides out of your rouge lips to befoul the air.

 

You’re between these two creatures, despite being the very youngest. You’re not Gray, despite that. Oh you’re Dark, that you must certainly are, because even if you were raised in the den of the Weasleys’, or the Potters’, or the Dumbledores’, then your thoroughbred dark blood would overpower any light that would try to creep into your soul, and in the magic rooming with your screaming heart.

 

But you’re not like your darling fiance, who pours over books describing the ways to make a person’s body betray themselves in the most horrible ways, not like Bellatrix, who twirls her wand around, before firing small, small, but countless curses at poor animals, and then house elves, and then muggles, or her husband, who delights in bending a person’s mind to the point where he can rip out their guts, and rut into the empty cavity, without even a hint of resistance from the pliant body.

 

Your core may be pitch, but you don’t travel to the depths of what the dark can do. To what is truly unjust, in what is truly monstrous, no, for the dark you seek, and pursue, and surround yourself is merely the realm of unknown, the realm of the earth, of nature, which you bow down to and kiss with more passion than you think you shall do with the Malfoy heir. The earth is the love you seeked, but not the love you got, as is evident with who your parents’ choice for you. Malfoy is pleasing to the eyes, and the way he holds his wand, and oozes magic, can’t be something you disagree with, hell, his wit, his intellect, his gliding words and smooth hands that never saw a day of labour you can learn to love, and slowly are, but what you do despise is the way he looks at lesser creatures, creatures he can bend, and push, how he plays with them, in the quiet hours of the night, and while a smile may never cross his face, the delight shines in his eyes none-the-less.

 

Hogwarts has none of that, at least, when you’re not around the Slytherins, who creep and hiss in the underbrush, all trying to find the prime beast, and take it’s place. With Malfoy having graduated a year previously, there has been a power vacuum, one that has yet to be truly filled. It’s a squabble among little serpents, and despite your green tie, you don’t partake. No, you enjoy the simple pleasures of things, and, of course, avoiding your younger relatives.

 

You read, you write, you go to the grounds below and stroke the Thestrals, and you make sure your grades are all O’s, and don’t put in any effort beyond that. You enjoy breathing the air, and ghosting your fingers over the walls, and enjoy exploring the castle to it’s fullest. You find an out of place snake on a sink in Myrtle's bathroom, a secret dueling room tucked away on the fourth floor, one in red and gold, find a forbidden library tucked away in a corner of the castle with books so old that they have sapped the magic of Hogwarts and grown wise, and if you smear blood on the walls, with fear in your blood, badgers will pace on the wallpaper, and eye any people who come near you.

 

You remember someone in red, always around, but your memory of them is as fleeting as snow in the wake of the sun's wrath.

 

You find a little Gryffindor girl with red hair and green eyes cooing at a garden snake, and reaching out her twig thin arm, and as the snake hisses back, and bumps it’s nose against her flesh like a puss, you walk on by, concluding that that day could have gone stranger than finding the Heir of Slytherin in Gryffindor. You never do make the connection between that girl and Lily Evans, the mudblood.

 

You marry Malfoy in the fall of that year, and you go to sleep on your wedding night stuffed full of cake, and delicious morsels. Your bed is of finer silks than you ever knew could be, and your husband, tall but slight and petite as he is, is already sleeping with alcohol on his breath.

...

 

You first met Lucius for the first time at one of your mother’s galas. Your sisters were there, so was cousin Sirius, and the little sobbing wench which was Regulus. You had been meeting other children for the first time, when a tall, muscled blond man came up to you, and gave you the hand to his spitting image, a boy who was even smaller than you, and like a bird, with frail bones and wonderful plumage.  He had big pale blue eyes, like lightning, with pupils the colour of shadowed dimples on the moon. His eyes were red rimmed, and you blinked at him, and he blinked at you. You held each other’s hands and were silent up until the moment Bella came up to you and snatched you away, in favour of playing house with Mr. Riddle, and Ariana Parkinson.

 

That little boy was left behind, and when you next saw him, his daddy was taking him home, the flesh that was held by adult hands was white, whiter than even his one skin tone.

 

…

 

In time, you learn to love Lucius Malfoy. He is never quite the romantic you always wanted, never as articulate and understanding as you would have liked, but with this marriage, you bring back the honour to your family that Andromeda lost, and you and your spawn will live comfortably, something that you can’t say for the children that your sisters have given the world.

 

You attend more galas, gain more influence, sample the world’s finest foods and wines, and listen to the drunken woes of many a nobleman. Lucius doesn’t want an heir yet, that, or he hasn’t been given permission by the Dark Lord, but it’ll come one day, and up until that day, you will gain allies you can gift to your babes.

 

Lucius is not a good man. He is the man whom you indulge in sweet kisses with, the man who bears the hair that so often runs through your fingers, who lets you sit atop him, and listen to the steady beat of his heart in his chest, as his cheeks were just so subtly coloured pink. You remember, in the moments where he’d grow crimson, where he’d stammer, and shift, despite the training grilled in him not to do so, you’d always smile so wide, and make sure to draw the moment out even more.

 

Despite this, you know he’s not a good man. He’s more adamant about Muggle destruction than Aunt Walburga, seethes when he sees a fresh, innocent face in Diagon Alley, and laments the state of this once great nation. You’ve grown in the years you’ve met this man, and met more muggleborns, more muggles, than you ever have before. So much, that it’s all blurred together.

 

_We all bleed the same, you realize, as a dark little boy lays dead at your husband’s feet._

…

 

Another honour you bring your parents, and Lucius, is that the potions say it’ll be a little boy. An heir to the Black name. Not far up the line of inheritance, but enough for Lucius’ eyes to shine and his lips to perk when you tell him, as he tried to kiss his son through planting love on your belly.

 

There’s barely a bump, now, and your husband hasn’t visited your bed since his seed was planted in you, since you told him it was a boy, and relief filled him up just as much as everything else was. The conflict, the war, between the Dark and the Light had grown to the point where it spilled into the muggle world, the world you no longer feel much about, and has touched everyone. Sometimes you’re glad about the fact that beyond your womb, little Draco won’t be able to hear anything, for the noises that creep into your brain keep you up at night, and the only reason you don’t look like an Inferi is the fact that you have a potioneer on hand to brew all that you wish.

 

When you’re in your third trimester, Russian wizards bow down in front of the Dark Lord, draw their wands, and start firing at his followers. In an instant, the conflict is quelled, and all but one of the wizards are dead, but so would have been you, if you hadn’t ducked when the greenest green sailed at your head. Your heart beats in your ear, and you draw your wand, and find yourself vivisecting a man with cutting curse after cutting curse.

 

Perhaps it’s the hormones, or perhaps the war isn’t just spilling into your physical world, but maybe into your quiet thoughts, and your brewing mind, and into the brain you had to break and glue back together the day you’re left all alone in that home.

 

That day you deny Lucius to come close to you, and you rock yourself to sleep, chanting the ingredients for the Fetus Expelling Ritual.

 

You wake up the next morning, and feel blind panic when you find your hips covered in blood. Your hands probe your tenders, and you almost sob with relief when you find that your water broke. You sob as a contraction hits you, and your toes curls, but you kiss your fingers and lay those digits on your belly, and you send a thought to your child, a prayer.

 

Only then do you remember to scream for Lucius.

 

When your darling boy, just as white as his father, you suspect, without all of infantile redness, with just as a shrill voice, is held in your hands, you beam so hard at the child that even he stops, to seemingly give you a peculiar look. Your breath hitches when the healer states that he has complications with his digestive organs, and will have to drink potions, and not wean like a proper baby should, and you ask if there will be long lasting consequences of the fact he was two weeks early. The healer shakes his head, even as he eyes the baby's little fingers.

 

When you’re alone with your little dragon, your red, your slight child, your greatest work, you kiss him from the toes up, and feel something curling around your heart, and warming you up like a stove. You may love Lucius, but he is tainted, tainted and dirtied from the harsh teachings of his father, broken by the pressure of your world, of your teachers, of the very air, and put back together all wrong and with his edges sharp and jagged and laugh growing higher and breathier by the day, and you _refuse_ to have the same thing to happen to your little boy.

 

Your innocent little boy, who watches you with rapture.

 

( _You know you’re not the best your boy can have, for sometimes you feel like it’s all too much, and you’re ready to yield, and let the darkness take away all of your senses and all that you are, only to replace you with something that can handle this world all the better. Humans aren’t strong, they’re weak, weak creatures, and you’ve never known that more than now._ )

 

...

 

Your boy is more than a year old, playing with blocks, and watching them fall, one by one, when you hear the news. Your husband marched into your house, eyes wide and wild, his fingers twitching for a wand he doesn’t have, and he throws off his death eater robes, and sets them alight with a thought. You know what that means, for he’s far too self serving, far too deep in this, to immolate his past with not as much as a wince.

 

“How.” You ask, and he tells you.

 

It was a little boy, a little boy with blond hair, and the love of his brown haired mother. You scoop up your own child as you hear what he says, and clench him in your arms, and don’t pay attention even when his grey eyes fill up with tears and he wails. Lucius doesn’t notice either, he’s far too busy making it seem like he’d been Imperiused for the last decade to notice.

It could have been Draco, you think, in a fit of paranoia.

 

( _It could have never been Draco, because you know that he will never be a savior of anything. Your dark blood made sure of that._ )

 

A few days after that, you learn cousin Sirius has taken in Potter’s spawn, alongside that Remus Lupin, after his parents were sent gibbering to Mungos, and you watch your husband fight against the werewolf to have custody, even if it’s partial, but he manages nothing more than a lot of bad publicity, and for a few members of Wizengamot to turn to Dumbledore, twinkly eyed and all.

 

You never do see your cousin, nor your smaller, green eyed one, at least, for a while.

…

 

With sudden clarity, you look down at your son, six years old and engrossed in a beginner's book about Blood Purity, and find yourself identifying the uneasiness in your belly that’s been there since your boy came to you one day, and asked you what a mudblood was.

 

It was fear, and disgust, but mostly fear, because you’ve always _dreaded_ this happening, always, ever since your husband gave Draco a tutor to teach him to read, and one of the first sentences he had to write was that purebloods are the greatest race on earth.

 

Your little dragon was going to grow up like his father, no matter what you tried, because you lack the charisma that Lucius has, you lack the ability to captivate people, to entrap them with words and make them doubt their current method of thinking to the point where they change into a mere caricature of who they were. You try harder than ever to make your boy change his mind, to make him a good person, or, at least, one who wouldn’t go on the same path as so many before him, but he doesn’t respect you like he does his father, not in the same way.

 

You stewed in misery for so long, it felt like you were to forever dwell in it.

 

You did your best, though, you gave him books, gave him love, taught him a bit of magic, and he fell in love with potions just as you did with writers.

 

When it was time for Draco to go to Hogwarts, he was the spitting image of Lucius, and he was bratty, spoiled, _a bully_ , and you know you failed on your end, and hope Hogwarts will mellow him out. Will smooth out his hard edges, and instead of creating a jagged cliff, will make a most smooth, a most kindly beach stone.

 

Your son will be the future of the world, will be a puzzle piece to the world’s jigsaw like you never could be, being the third daughter of a branch of the Black family, and you can only hope he will help carve the world into something wonderful.

**Author's Note:**

> A companion piece to Lily's story earlier in the series. I don't like this nearly as much as the last one, it feels like it's less my style and. Something else. But I had to do Narcissa, and am planning for a Snape piece, and after that, if I don't make anymore one-shots, I reckon I can tackle a large fanfic centering around Harry and Draco. 
> 
> Probs won't finish it, if I start it, but. Eh.


End file.
